Welcome to the next edition of The Human Condition Interviews—featuring Rutgers Distinguished Professor, Dr. Lee Jussim.
Glenn Geher’s Interview on the Human Condition with Dr. Lee Jussim
Lee Jussim (used with permission)
Lee Jussim, Ph.D. is a Distinguished Professor and social psychologist at Rutgers University. He has published over 100 articles and 6 books, with a new edited book, The Free Inquiry Papers (a collection of essays by authors from across the disciplines that constitutes a clarion call for and defense of the need for open inquiry, academic freedom and free speech for both science and liberal democracy). He is also founding and chief editor of The Journal of Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences. He has chaired three different programs at Rutgers: Criminal Justice, Psychology, and Anthropology.
GG: Lee, it is so great to have you here speaking on The Human Condition. For decades, you’ve been a top voice in the field of social psychology and your thoughtful approach to understanding the human condition is truly admirable. Recently, you’ve co-authored an upcoming chapter on “the new book-burning” within the academy. In a sense, your newest work is meta-social-psychology—the social psychological study of the behaviors of those who produce work in the field of social psychology. Toward that end, you’ve recently written quite a bit about censorship within the academy.
In broad strokes, please describe your take on censorship within the academy—as well as how it connects with book-burning practices of yore.
LJ: Let's start by defining terms, because people often confuse free speech, academic freedom and free inquiry and treat them as almost synonyms. They are partially overlapping, but they are not synonyms. Free speech is the freedom to say what you like; academic freedom refers to protections afforded academics for engaging in controversial speech and expressing their views, or describing their scholarly findings, even when those views or findings upset people. Free inquiry applies to anyone, including but not restricted to, academics, and refers to the right to study anything, no matter how much doing so pisses off some people or interest groups.
They overlap in that they all refer to varieties of freedom of expression. However, they can and do sometimes conflict. For example, let's say Professor Smith publishes an article that pisses off lots of people. Academic freedom means that his university administrators cannot fire Smith for doing this. Furthermore, if Smith is at a State University, First Amendment free speech protections mean that the administrators, who are formally government employees, cannot be in the business of punishing speech merely for being controversial.
However, free speech protections also mean that Smith's colleagues can denounce him, attempt to publicly shame and smear him, ban him from professional conferences, disinvite him from talks already scheduled, and attempt to get his paper retracted (effectively censoring it). Thus, the free speech protections afforded academics, including Smith's colleagues, can be exploited to threaten and, if successful, restrict Smith's academic freedom and ability to engage in public discourse and possibly even study of this controversial topic. Worse, they send a message to everyone else, "If you dare make these points in public, you risk us coming after you next."
Now we can get, first, to the larger context here within which academic censorship is taking place. First, historically, modern free speech protections (and those for its cousins, academic freedom and free inquiry) have been centuries in the making. And it is not a linear story of progress. Instead, free speech is more or less perennially under pressure to cave to other interests. We are in a period of a "squeeze" on free speech and academic freedom from both left and right. On the left, you have concepts of "harm" that have been seemingly ever-expanding, so that now journals (such as Nature) have policies permitting editors to reject articles, not because they are bad science, but because they violate editors' values or because the editors' subjective judgments are that the article could potentially cause some sort of "harm" (read: "produce support for political ideas that I oppose"). On the right, you have the slew of "divisive concepts" and anti-Critical Race Theory laws passed by of some Republican-dominated state governments that effectively prohibit faculty from advancing certain ideas (at least until the laws are challenged in court, where I suspect they will not be upheld because they so obviously violate First Amendment prohibitions on government restrictions on speech).
On top of that, you have had a massive, decades-long rise in self-censorship. The rise, which really accelerated over the last 15 years or so, is likely due, in part, to social media and the risk of being denounced, mobbed and publicly shamed. Fear of the mob is not irrational, because careers have been ruined this way, jobs lost, and students driven out of colleges and universities. So self-censorship has also massively risen.
Now, book burning. Books have been burned throughout the ages as a way for some group, often a powerful one, to establish and consolidate power, by saying "these ideas, and the people promoting them, are the type of filth and corruption that must be purged from the society to protect decent people like you and me."
Ray Bradbury, author of, among other things, Fahrenheit 451, a dystopian scifi novel that centers on book burning as a centerpiece of authoritarian control, put it this way:
“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”
Modern academics engage in book burning in Bradbury's sense. They do not literally burn books. But, when an academic article offends their sensibilities, usually involving some aspect of "social justice," they often use social media to organize into what I have called "denunciation mobs" calling for some paper to be retracted. There are professional standards for when it is appropriate to retract a published article—especially when data are fraudulent or manifestly wrong—but those standards do not include "pisses off an academic mob's social justice sensibilities."
GG: From a social psychological perspective, how would you explain the current trends that you are describing as “the new book-burning?” And what do these processes reveal about human nature on a broader scale?
LJ: This is classic leftwing authoritarianism, but it is done in the name of "prosocial" goals, such as protecting marginalized groups. It is deeply misguided, in my view, because the best way to protect marginalized groups is to ensure that they have the full set of liberal democratic rights to advance their interests; and that starts with free speech, academic freedom, and free inquiry.
The "authoritarian temptation" runs deep and is ever-present, in large portions of even the American population, on both the left and the right. Its not that "most Americans are authoritarian." The ambient levels of authoritarianism on the left and right in the U.S. is probably in the single digits percentwise. But moral outrage, actual injustices, demagogues, hyper-polarization, all can and do create situations where otherwise seemingly more or less normal decent people endorse violence directed at their political enemies and seek to deprive them of rights that are the bedrock of a liberal democratic society (free speech, free association, due process, etc.).
Colleges teach a lot about social justice. They teach almost nothing about why social justice must be built on a foundation of liberal democracy, because without liberal democracy, you risk ending up with the authoritarianism of the right (Nazis, fascists) or left (communists). Both produced horrors on an unimaginable scale. This is massive injustice, not justice.
GG: In your mind, is book-burning ever appropriate? Are there contexts where, as you see it, such actions are justified?
LJ: Heh. Well, its funny. I hated high school. Don't get me wrong, I had plenty of friends and pretty much had a grand olde tyme of it, but it was not because of school. I hated the regimented nature of high school. I hated sitting at a fucking desk 6 hours a day. Half of my teachers were idiots; most of the rest were incompetent. The principal was a fucking authoritarian asshole.
So, the day I graduated high school, in a private "ceremony," I took all my high school textbooks from that year, and, in a garbage can, burned them all.
It was deeply satisfying. And I do not think I hurt anybody by doing it. In fact, I do not think anyone even knew I did this before reporting it here, some 50 years later.
More generally, I think actual book burning, like flag-burning, deserves to be a protected form of expression (which, in the U.S., it is). I could imagine cases where I might even support it as protest. However, I also consider academic retractions-by-mobs a far more serious threat to academic freedom and free inquiry than book burning protests. And, on that score, no, I can imagine no cases where I would support retracting a published academic paper absent fraud or some similar ethical violation (such as mistreating study participants without their consent), no matter how bad I thought the paper was. The solution to bad papers is to criticize them and expose how bad they are (which I do all the time in both my conventional academic scholarship and my blogs at Psych Today and Unsafe Science).
GG: I’ve always found your advice and guidance extremely insightful. Given your extensive experience as a behavioral scientist, what advice would you give to budding behavioral scientists who are looking to form a career in this field?
LJ: Well, thank you. Not sure I have much advice beyond the basics one could get from almost any experienced social scientist, but here goes.
1. Find a graduate program that you will love to be in. You will probably be there at least 5 years. That is a long time, way too long if it is an onerous chore.
2. As part of 1, find one, or, preferably, more, faculty advisors who you believe you will love to work with. Work with lots of different people if you can. This form of diversity is invaluable.
3. Get tons of stats/methodsy skills. Tons. Fucktons. Learn about how social scientists concoct bullshit (also here) and promote propaganda. This will help you discern the nuggets of gold amongst the heaping piles of bullshit that social sciences produce.
GG: You are founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Open Inquiry in Behavioral Science—the official journal of the Society for Open Inquiry in Behavioral Science. Please tell us a bit about the journal as well as the broader society that is affiliated with. Importantly, what impact or changes do you hope that the journal and society will effect within the often-treacherous waters of academia.
LJ: The Society for Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences was organized to provide a bastion of free expression amongst the rising censoriousness and politicization of academia. One such initiative of the society is its Journal of Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences. The journal's entire purpose is to facilitate communication among social scientists about their empirical research no matter what conclusions it reaches, and to facilitate free inquiry, especially but not exclusively on controversial topics. At Unsafe Science, I provided more detail about the society, about its first conference, and about the journal.
GG: Thank you so much for your time and participation in The Human Condition. Your participation is deeply appreciated.
LMK if you have questions and/or want to add anything, etc.—and thanks so much!!!
I can't say or write anything short, so it’s already long, so that can do it.
Although Lee blogged at Psychology Today for about 10 years, where his essays received over a million page views, the rising censorship and increasingly heavy-handed editorial oversight there drove him to move to Substack, where he now blogs at Unsafe Science. His twitter account focuses mainly on social science and academia.
You can find a selection of his academic papers here:
https://sites.rutgers.edu/lee-jussim/selectpublications/
Note: The views expressed by my guest do not necessarily represent my own views on any particular matter. ~Glenn Geher